


these hearts adore (too cold for you here and now)

by arthur_pendragon



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Boarding School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Bully Arthur Pendragon, Dirty Talk, Facials, Fingerfucking, First Kiss, First Time Blow Jobs, Hand Jobs, Hate Sex, Jealousy, Kissing, Love Confessions, Love at First Sight, Love/Hate, M/M, Pining Merlin (Merlin), Possessive Behavior, Possibly Unrequited Love, Rimming, Self-Loathing, Slight Age Difference, Verbal Humiliation, desperate pining
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2019-09-27 22:03:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 7
Words: 19,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17170229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arthur_pendragon/pseuds/arthur_pendragon
Summary: Red, golden, brown leaves begin drifting from wizen trees when Merlin has his first kiss.He’d thought — hoped that it would happen the way it does in the flicks, even though he’s the best friend of the biggest cynic in school and probably the town. He’d wanted it to be romantic, with him holding hands with his crush, the two of them having just confessed to harbouring feelings far beyond their comprehension for each other.Merlin is fifteen when autumn flakes the trees in a slow dance and the older boy who’s hated him for years and years slams him into a wall and kisses him.





	1. all i am is a man

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [why am i crying for you, babe?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16369739) by [arthur_pendragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arthur_pendragon/pseuds/arthur_pendragon). 



> This story is an expansion/remix of _[why am I crying for you, babe?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16369739)_ , which I wrote for Pornalot 2018. It's a seasonal sequel of sorts to _[secrets i have held in my heart](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15527745)_.
> 
> I can't promise regular updates, though I do promise to finish this story! I hope you won't mind.  
> The rating most certainly will go up in the future.
> 
> (The title is a mashup of lyrics from [Sweater Weather by the Neighbourhood](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCdwKhTtNNw))
> 
> The school this takes place in is a boarding school which accepts day pupils.

**these hearts adore (too cold for you here and now)  
** _prologue_

 

Red, golden, brown leaves begin drifting from wizen trees when Merlin has his first kiss.

He’d thought — hoped that it would happen the way it does in the flicks, even though he’s the best friend of the biggest cynic in school and probably the town. He’d wanted it to be romantic, with him holding hands with his crush, the two of them having just confessed to harbouring feelings far beyond their comprehension for each other.

Merlin is fifteen when autumn flakes the trees in a slow dance and the older boy who’s hated him for years and years slams him into a wall and kisses him.

It’s not very exciting — it’s a wet press of Arthur’s mouth to his, hot when everything else is wintry, but the back of Merlin’s head hurts too much for him to focus on the kiss and Arthur shoves himself off Merlin five seconds into it, anyway, sneering at Merlin like that explains everything. Merlin shivers from the rush of cold air that fills the space Arthur just vacated, and dimly wonders why it’s got to be him, all the time, always only _Merlin_.

Arthur doesn’t look backwards as he leaves. Merlin touches his mouth first, then his throbbing head, and wants to be sick.

* * *

 

Merlin’s life isn’t _hell_. It’s not torture for him to wake up and kiss his mum good morning, eat her griddlecakes and dash to the bus stop for school. It’s just that Arthur Pendragon tries very hard to make it so, for no reason that Merlin can comprehend.

It’s horribly ironic, therefore, that Merlin’s heartbeat speeds up at the sight of him, and not out of fear or dread or any sane emotion — but hope: that this time’ll be different — this time when he’s with his friends (Knights, they fancy themselves, and Arthur is their King), in the midst of all their chatter and raucous laughter, this time when his eyes land on Merlin, his lips won’t curl in disgust and he won’t spit cruel words at Merlin. This time he’ll smile and say hello, and Merlin will wave and feel lucky that the golden Head Boy, whom Merlin’s looked up to (fuck-up that he seems to be) and perhaps even loved ever since he entered this posh institute, likes him.

The dream never comes true, no matter how hard Merlin squeezes his eyes shut and prays. At this point he prays because it’s just easier to.

* * *

 

It starts on a bright morning.

Arthur doesn’t say anything when they cross each other’s paths in the corridor, but Merlin’s shoulder smarts afterwards. William, Merlin’s best mate, walking with Merlin, purses his lips and prepares to say something, but Merlin quells him with a look. It’s not worth it. Not worth attracting more of Pendragon’s ire than usual. _Let’s just walk faster and get away before he decides to return for seconds._

“I really don’t fucking get how you could love him,” William mumbles anyway, and Merlin shakes his head and sighs in resignation — he doesn’t love Arthur, not really, how do you (how could you) (why would you _ever_ ) love someone like him? — and turns to see if Arthur heard, _please don’t have heard_ , and his heart leaps into his throat as he finds Arthur looking directly at him, turned away from his mates too. A small, ugly smirk curves his mouth as he turns back.

He heard.

Time stops. William’s foot rises from the floor for a step and takes an eternity landing. Merlin is going to die.

“C’mon, Merls,” William says, not noticing anything out of the ordinary, is this what it’s like to be a Muggle in Potter’s world? Dementors came for him and wizards laid down their lives for him and all the Muggles ever thought was _what a muggy fine night this is_. Merlin nods and goes to class somehow, wondering how his heart will be used as a weapon now.

Then Arthur catches him alone at lunch and kisses him, lips and hate, and this is where Merlin’s life ceases to bear any similarity to the kind of life he’d wanted it to be.


	2. i want the world in my hands

_one_

 

The kiss burns Merlin the entire day; he can think about nothing else. He shakily licks his lips every now and then, imagining he can still taste Arthur, that his spit is still on them, marking them strange and not-his so that he has to suck them in, trap them between his teeth to stop the hurt from spreading to his heart. His pulse pounds in his ears and sweat forms beads on the nape of his neck, rolling down to pool in the small of his back, freezing when he moves against the breeze. He doesn’t understand what’s going on and he’s horribly afraid to admit it — Arthur had definitely heard Will say what he did, and that had to have spurred the, the…

Arthur doesn’t like him.

He, amongst other cruelties, once called Merlin _Benedict Cumberbatch post-accident_ and has mocked his secondhand uniform and the fact that he can’t afford a room at the school, not even with his scholarship.

Arthur can’t stand the sight of him.

This morning, he pinned Merlin to a wall, grabbed his hips with crushing force, and caught his mouth with his own.

After the last bell rings, Merlin hurries to pack all his things into his satchel and escape the day. Will, who lives with Merlin and his mum on the weekends, is waiting for him at the entrance to the building; they always take the bus home together, sloughing off the week’s memories with each mile. Merlin really wants to tell Will what happened.

Will, if he knew, would be furious on Merlin’s behalf (Merlin is a coward). He would say the most awful things about Arthur, and Merlin would feel better because he isn’t capable of dragging up such hatred from within himself for Arthur Pendragon. Will thinks it’s because he’s in love with Arthur. Will’s wrong. He’d be the worst of fools to love someone who despises him so clearly. He doesn’t love Arthur. He doesn’t love, he _can’t_ love Arthur —

“Wyllt.”

Merlin jerks. He resists the reflexive shivering that Arthur’s voice sets off throughout his body. He won’t turn around even though the Head Boy of the school, two forms up and nearly three years older, is in his classroom.

It’s been a while since Arthur went to the effort of seeking him out (not counting this morning, and Merlin is not counting this morning). Maybe if he stays quiet and doesn’t move, Arthur will leave. His schoolmates are all long gone, ’cause Merlin dallied for no fucking reason (lies, he was hoping for — for something like this, a new daisy for the chain, and now it’s happened. Look what you’ve done, Merlin, you hope for things and they blossom into reality and torture you), and it’s just him and Arthur in the empty room, suffocatingly silent.

“Wyllt,” Arthur says again, and Merlin hates that he cringes at the sound.

Arthur repeats Merlin’s surname again, a tad impatiently. He’s closer to Merlin now.

Merlin shoulders his satchel and finally turns to face Arthur. “What,” he says, guarded.

Arthur stares at him, expression inscrutable. They’re not that far apart in height — Merlin’s tallish for about sixteen and Arthur’s eighteen and damned _Apollo_ ; Merlin had found it so very easy to kiss him back.

“Didn’t tell your best friend, then, did you?” The posh diction cuts into Merlin with each sharp word. Merlin doesn’t speak like gold coins shower from his tongue when he sings, as if he was raised on a diet of airs and graces and the Queen’s English.

Merlin swallows. “About what?”

The corner of Arthur’s lips twitches up. Merlin’s eyes flicker to the dimple thus carved on Arthur’s face and then away. His throat is parched. His eyes are stinging. He’s fooling no one with his does-he-doesn’t-he bullshit. He does. He does so deeply. Baselessly.

“Nothing,” Arthur says easily and makes to turn, still smirking. His grey sweater sleeves are pushed up to his elbows and his shirt is still perfectly ironed, sticking out from the sweater collar and bottom hem, unnatural, as if Arthur had carefully pulled them into place just minutes ago. His blazer is nowhere to be seen; it’s probably been pinched for a lark by Gwaine or one of the other ‘knights’.

“I didn’t,” the words come out in a rush, and Merlin wants to punch himself bloody but struggles to the end of the sentence because Arthur paused when he spoke so maybe if he says everything he’ll even stay. “I didn’t tell anyone about you — us at lunch.”

“Wouldn’t want to get the boy you _love_ in trouble.” Arthur relaxes, comes a step closer. Merlin stands his ground. Here is the tidal wave that submerges you. He is about to lash against you, Phoebus and tempest. “I heard Chauncey this morning. Isn’t he right, Merlin? You love me.”

When Merlin doesn’t answer, gazing fixedly at the knit of Arthur’s sweater, Arthur tips his head up with the knuckles of a loosely-curled fist under his jaw. Merlin gulps. Is Arthur going to punch him? Arthur’s never hit him before, too pristine a Camelot student to ever dirty his hands like that. Merlin, the scholarship swot, is a downright juvie in comparison to the image most people have of Arthur.

“You love me, don’t you?” Arthur repeats, voice singsong and heavy. He almost seems at a loss for words. Almost. “Stupid little shit. What sort of Stockholm Syndrome fuck-up d’you have to be to —”

“I really don’t feel a fucking thing for you, Pendragon,” Merlin spits, fierce, contrary. Arthur smiles, grips his chin with the hand that tilted it up, and presses his mouth to Merlin’s.

The breath knocks out of Merlin as a soft grunt and he stumbles backward under the force of Arthur’s kiss. Arthur bunches the layers of Merlin’s blazer, sweater, shirt in his other hand and tugs Merlin to him, wrapping the arm around his back, tight enough to break bone. He smells like sweat and cologne, and is warm where Merlin’s nose and cheek are flush against him. Merlin clutches his shoulders, not kissing back, not — not yet. This isn’t — no. This could be a trap. Arthur could use this to hurt Merlin. The knights could be waiting outside the classroom, ready with phone cameras and jeers. He keeps his eyes open, unable to afford closing them.

“C’mon,” Arthur murmurs, pulling away slightly. “C’mon, Wyllt, isn’t this what you want? Aren’t you in _love_ with me?”

“What are you playing at,” Merlin starts, but Arthur kisses him again, fire-hot and strangely sweet. Merlin can’t believe this is happening, so he gives in to whatever this must be. A dream, perhaps, that he slipped into unawares like he does so often, where consequences are abstract maths and maybe this person whose arms he’s in is anyone but the boy who took one look at him his first day at Camelot four years ago, wrinkled his nose, and looked away.

Arthur’s mouth is so soft. Merlin tries to mimic whatever he’s doing, painfully self-conscious, badly wanting to impress the boy who hates him. He doesn’t know how it’s done. He wouldn’t. So that Arthur pulls away again after a minute and snorts is utterly crushing. Merlin shoves at Arthur, who instantly lets him go.

“Jesus, Wyllt, what the fuck —”

“Stay away from me,” Merlin snarls, humiliation hollowing his anger. Red in the face, he snatches up his satchel from his desk, suddenly unable to bear a second more of breathing the same air as Arthur. “I’ve never wanted a second of your attention” — he nearly chokes at the lie. He’s wanted Arthur’s approval as long as he’s known Arthur exists, died every day without it — “and I don’t care for whatever the fuck this is. I’m not playing your game.”

Arthur’s eyebrows rise, but he says nothing, nonchalantly tucking his hands into his pockets and watching as Merlin rushes to the room entrance — Will must be concerned by now; what if he’d come looking and seen them? If a _teacher_ had seen them? What a narrow fucking escape — until Merlin’s nearly out the door, when he speaks.

“I’ll see you Monday,” he calls.

Merlin somehow has the will to ignore him, heart rattling in his ribcage, running down stairs and corridors until he reaches the huge main doors of the school to be greeted by an irritated best friend and the bite of the wind in his face.


	3. i hate the beach, but i stand (in California with my toes in the sand)

_two_

 

Arthur’s eyes are flinty when he sits down, glancing at Merlin. He’s sought Merlin out. Probably looking for a fight and his favourite target; not that they fight these days. Merlin sees him out of the corner of his eye as he pretends to stare unfocused at the stair steps descending in front of him. He’s sitting on the topmost one with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his palms, like a child. Arthur’s close to him, but not as much as Merlin wants.

He opens his mouth. Nothing that he wants to say resolves into voiced words.

“What is fucking _wrong_ with you, Wyllt?” he hears a minute later, and startles at Arthur’s vehemence. “What in the _world_ is wrong with you?”

“Glutton for punishment,” Merlin offers, stretching his legs out on the stairs below.

Arthur doesn’t respond, instead grabbing Merlin’s wrist and _tugging_ (never a plea, never) and Merlin goes, tumbling against Arthur’s chest and already arching for his mouth.

Monday was three weeks and four days ago, and Merlin’s learnt to kiss Arthur in a myriad ways. Over the weekend he googled it — Will, who didn’t know why he was doing it, only that he was, mocked him for it: such a _Merlin_ thing to do — and then Monday came and Arthur found him at lunch again. Merlin lied to himself, told his treacherous heart that he was only skipping lunch ’cause his mum hadn’t packed any for him (not that she ever does; the school provides it for its students), and then Arthur strolled into his classroom, alone, and without any prompting Merlin _lunged_ at him —

And Arthur had only smirked under Merlin’s lips, catching hold of Merlin’s jaw.

The following Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays and Fridays melted into each other, like their secret kisses and the way Arthur licked behind Merlin’s teeth, Merlin’s tongue pressed to his, lapping slow and lavish, seemingly only to make Merlin shudder. Merlin doesn’t remember anything he’s learnt in his classes this month; only the way Arthur had grown hungrier when Merlin’s hands had slipped under his blazer to touch and roam.

Now it’s Friday again and Merlin’s trying his best to be ashamed of his behaviour. He is. He isn’t.

He isn’t and can’t be, not when Arthur sighs into Merlin’s mouth and licks into it. They’re dangerously close to toppling down the stairs but Merlin is snug in Arthur’s embrace, between his legs and holding Arthur’s head with his thumbs under the curves of his jaw. Arthur viciously bites Merlin’s lip — angry today, very angry — and pulls before letting go. Merlin takes a moment to catch his breath, panting against Arthur’s chin, only just stopping himself from drawing over it with the tip of his tongue. He’s half on his knees and half prone atop Arthur and everything hurts because it’s stretched the wrong way and suspended in motion, but he could’ve been upside down and contorted in a box for all he gives a damn.

“Fuck you, Wyllt,” Arthur mutters through gritted teeth. “You bastard. _Fuck_ you.”

“Yeah,” Merlin huffs, dizzy from this one kiss. “Fuck me, whatever.”

He doesn’t mean to say it the way it comes out, but that’s what it sounds like — _I want you, I_ want _you_ — and it’s so jarring that Arthur freezes instantly and Merlin flinches on instinct, expecting to be shoved off, to crash against the banister, break his back thudding down the steps. But Arthur’s still wrinkling Merlin’s shirt under his blazer, clutching it tight enough to rip the seams.

Arthur inhales, once, through his nose. Merlin won’t look at him, skin crawling with shame. God, he’s a fuck-up, isn’t he? This is the boy who takes one look at Merlin’s textbooks and nearly pisses himself laughing. He’s the reason Merlin carefully wrapped the covers in newspaper so Arthur won’t ever see the dog-eared, battered pages of the books again, knock them out of his hands and make Merlin bow in front of him to pick them up.

Merlin wants to ride him for days.

“Have you ever even got a blowie?” Arthur asks, still breathless.

“No,” Merlin answers. Hungry for more kisses, he leans in, but Arthur stops him.

“Who’ve you got off with?”

Merlin colours, staying quiet.

“Oh, fuck, really?” Arthur murmurs, twigging anyway. “Not even Morris wanted to touch you, you’re that hideous?”

“We were never like that,” Merlin says, squirming in Arthur’s hold now. Arthur drags him impossibly closer in a tug that feels more like a gut punch. “Never. He was just a friend.”

“Too boring for him, were you?” Arthur grins, vicious in a way Merlin can never replicate, and it fucking _hurts_ because Merlin had merely been sticking up for one of his only friends his first week in this insane hell of a school, and that, of all things, was what made Arthur take notice of him — and hate him on sight. “Too much of a prissy swot to spread your legs for him?”

“We weren’t like that,” Merlin repeats. He’s still framing Arthur’s face with his hands; with incredible nerve he slides one over warm skin and presses down on Arthur’s lip with a thumb. Arthur’s eyes are trained on Merlin’s neck; Merlin steals the opportunity to look at those fucking gorgeous eyes, those eyelashes, deep gold, almost brown.

He’s partly expecting Arthur to swat him away and change his mind about all of this when Arthur’s tongue flicks out, laps at the thumb. Merlin shivers and hooks his thumb in proper, the ridge of Arthur’s teeth blunt against it. Arthur fixes him with his gaze, unyielding again, closes his lips over the finger and pouts and _sucks_. Merlin goes fiery liquid and just collapses against Arthur, makes him bear his weight as he curves up and laves the place his skin touches Arthur’s, any lingering shame that he had burning up with the ache in his heart, his — his groin.

“So, virgin,” Arthur says, jerking his head away. Merlin’s spit-wet hand falls to his side. Arthur might push him off if he puts it on him again, so he waits for it to dry. “Who else’ve you kissed?”

Merlin really doesn’t want to answer this. He sniffs and closes his eyes. His nose prickles, readying for the humiliation that’s no doubt going to follow once Arthur returns to the main school building and announces this to everyone, but before he can entreat Arthur to keep this out of his usual taunts Arthur shoves him, has got him flat on his back on the landing. Merlin’s head slams against the cold stone. He yelps.

“Off,” Arthur snarls, and it’s almost as if he’s a wild animal tearing at Merlin’s clothes, shirt parting under the slide of his hands as if by magic. Merlin tries to return the favour, rucking Arthur’s blazer over his shoulders — they both pause whilst Arthur flings the coat to the side and Merlin unbuttons his trousers and then Arthur’s — and then there they are. Arthur sits on his haunches, straddling Merlin’s hips, and just stares at Merlin’s bare chest, down at his stomach, at the open trousers and the pornographic bulging of his pants. Merlin fidgets under the attention; no one’s ever seen him like this before and he thinks he might _die_ if Arthur mocks him right now.

His fingers itch to bury themselves in Arthur’s hair. He’s so fucking turned on he’s aching with it. Wants to wrap his legs around Arthur’s hips and rub their groins together. He’s going to come in about ten seconds if Arthur touches him. Arthur’ll touch him, right? Not — not anything else? He keeps forgetting. He has to remember who Arthur really is. Arthur is not his friend. Arthur does not like him. Arthur isn’t even gay, but he’d go to any lengths, wouldn’t he, if hurting Merlin was involved?

“What are you going to do?” he asks quietly, fighting to stay motionless.

Arthur’s gaze jerks back up to meet his, and instead of answering the question —

“You’re hard for me, aren’t you, _Mer_ lin?” he says, almost inaudibly, still seething. “I can see it.”

Merlin whimpers. That’s the first time Arthur’s ever spoken his name. Arthur’s eyes widen.

“So fucking hard for me. Jesus. Look at you.”

And slowly, he drags the elastic of Merlin’s pants over the bulge, down, down, until Merlin’s cock juts out, flushed and pink. Merlin wants to curl into himself. This is. God. This — what the fuck is happening, Arthur’s fingers are brushing against the tender skin of his balls, Merlin’s going to come all over them, and now Arthur’s pulling his own cock out and _fuck_ , his cock is fucking gorgeous, of course it is, long and thick and oh. Arthur’s also, he’s, he’s…

“You’re hard for me, too,” Merlin says, giving in to the impulse to buck his hips up against his bully’s. Arthur chokes on a huff and it thrills Merlin to think that that might’ve been the start of a moan, maybe.

“Don’t move,” Arthur snaps. “And shut up.”

Merlin fists his hands in the wings of his shirt, attempting to comply. Arthur leans over Merlin, one hand next to Merlin’s ear. Merlin watches as he licks his lips and — _ah._

“You’re such a girl,” Arthur whispers, hand moving unhurriedly over them both. “Blushing all down your neck and across your chest. Fucking idiot. Nothing makes me happier than your misery, and you _know_ that and even then, look, you’re leaking all over my fingers and whining like a puppy under me. Can’t believe you. Poor little scholarship slut, what’re you going to tell your mum when you get home? You gonna tell your mum the Head Boy fucked her son? Gonna tell her you go for blokes?”

Merlin’s not a masochist, nor does he lack respect for himself. He didn’t ask to fall in love with Arthur and a tiny part of him somewhere behind his heart had hoped that Arthur would treat him properly if only during this physical thing in which he _knows_ Merlin’s letting him be the first to have at Merlin’s body, but no, of course he wouldn’t even dream of being decent, of course he’d choose to wound him at his most vulnerable. Merlin’s eyes fill with tears and he raises his arms to his face to hide them, urging Arthur to go faster so he can come quick and just — learn his lesson for once in his horrible life. No one loves you, Merlin. Especially not this boy.

“Crying?” Arthur asks, so close that Merlin can taste Arthur’s breath, mint and sweet. “Answer me.”

“You’re an arsehole,” Merlin says, smothering the words as they crawl past his lips, and loathes himself for being every bit the squirmy slutty virgin — what a fucking brilliant combination — Arthur claims he is.

“Yeah,” Arthur agrees, or not really, speeding up, seeming to enjoy the way Merlin jerks and shudders under him. “You _really_ hate me. Can’t stand the sight of me. Don’t want to seduce me into classrooms and corridors and bloody stairwells to snog, no, sir. Definitely don’t look at me with those fucking eyes whenever you can during assemblies and lunch like you want to choke on my cock.”

Merlin comes with a sob that Arthur swallows, if only to prevent it echoing up and down all the flights and have people come running; he thinks Arthur kisses him the entire time it takes him to come to his senses, but when he opens his eyes and lets his arms flop to the floor, still like melting ice but who the fuck cares he was just brought off by his first love, Arthur’s just… sitting there. Looking at him. Thinking, all careful and blank. Merlin will never know what goes on in that golden head.

He’s still hard, though, loosely holding his cock, so Merlin dares to swipe a hand through his own come and grab at Arthur and tug, and Arthur lets him with a deep sigh and a few more pulls later Arthur comes all over Merlin’s spent, soft cock. Merlin breathes and breathes at the warmth of Arthur’s spend; it feels like a strangely possessive act that Arthur shouldn’t really be capable of. He’d ask Arthur about it, but Arthur’s not capable of spitting anything but malicious, hurtful taunts at Merlin at the best of times, either.

It’s probably a good thing that it happened after school, all this, that the day students’ve all buggered off for their two days’ hols, even Will going home early at Merlin’s urging, and the boarders’ve withdrawn to their fancy _dormitories_ in their stupid little _houses_ , starting fires for the night and preparing for bloody Christmas already. Good thing that they’re alone, not really risking being found by anyone except the groundsmen and maybe the doorkeepers, but what does it matter now. The boy Merlin loves just brought him off. The boy Merlin loves, who hates him, still grasped his cock tight. The boy who’ll never fucking love Merlin back.

“You’re a right mess,” Arthur says, and it stings how disinterested he sounds in Merlin now, but soon it won’t hurt Merlin. Merlin’s not going to care. He’s going to go home, wash all of this off, and Arthur can go fuck himself from now on.

“Yeah, well, you’re half the reason,” he replies, struggling to his feet, gingerly wiping at his crotch with his shirttails. Arthur’s immaculate, leaning against the wall, observing Merlin as if he’s got nothing else to do. Merlin won’t admit to himself that he misses Arthur’s warmth already, flexing his fingers, resisting the bite of the temperature. He cleans himself up as best he can, hoping his blazer covers the stains on his shirt, and is about to leave without another word when Arthur catches his arm.

“Oi! Not going to say goodbye to your Head Boy? Where’s your manners, Wyllt?”

Merlin whirls around, acid remark forming on his tongue that he’d never have said while they were fucking, but Arthur shocks it all out of him with a kiss. He doesn’t separate from Merlin for ages and ages, luxuriously snogging him for some fucking reason — Merlin feels like a hypocrite when he finds himself wholly unwilling to break away; addicted, maybe, to the feeling of Arthur’s lips on his, Arthur’s tongue under his.

“You could be a good shag,” Arthur says, shoving Merlin off all of a sudden, leering at him. “Still want me to fuck you?”

The watch on Merlin’s wrist tells him he’s got six minutes until the next bus. He can make it. He’s not going to think about Arthur. He’s not going to answer.

“I’d take you up to my single room and fuck you into the mattress,” Arthur continues, half-smiling. Merlin shivers despite himself at the sharp flare of _please_  that the visual fires up in him.

“I’ve got to go,” he mumbles instead.

“Say you love me,” Arthur says, falling into step beside Merlin as he walks out into the corridor and starts finding his way out.

“No,” Merlin says, weak despite all the confidence and self-respect clamouring in his brain. He refuses to even glance Arthur’s way. “Fuck off to your posh fucking life. I don’t want you.” Even he can see how transparently pathetic his lie is.

Arthur’s resultant laughter is cruel, delighted. He presses a kiss to Merlin’s mouth in the open, chancing discovery in the empty passageway, and saunters off to the upper floors, to his stupid single room and his stupid sodding mattress.

Reality lays waste to Merlin on the bus home, eviscerating his heart and wrecking his common sense; he’s never hated himself more.


	4. use the sleeves of my sweater, let's have an adventure

_three_

 

Merlin really isn’t good at anything athletic. It never stops Will from bursting onto the sports grounds, dragging him by the arm with him for cricket with the rest of their year. Merlin is pants at fielding and even worse at batting, so his classmates usually rope him into umpiring for their matches. It’s the same today.

It’s a beautiful morning despite the clouds and the October chill. A couple of the girls who decided not to play are keeping score and commentating on/ loudly mocking the batsmen’s tortoise-slow running between the wickets, drawing snorts from everyone every now and then. Merlin likes to think Gwen and Freya are his friends, even though the academic competition between them is fierce; it’s a running joke in their year that the highest ranking anyone save for them can hope for is fourth place.

Ten minutes into the start of the match, some Year 13s decide to join in, having spotted them from their classroom windows. Thought they’d take advantage of their free period and make up a proper side against the Year 11s.

Of course, of _course_ Arthur’s here, too. Merlin grits his teeth, hoping someone’ll tell the boys to fuck off — surely it hasn’t escaped everyone’s notice that they see far more of the Year 13s than they ought to. But no one complains, clearly thrilled that Head Boy Arthur Pendragon and his bloody knights are amongst the newcomers, standing around, looking all grown-up and cool with their jumper sleeves scrunched up to their elbows and shirt cuffs poking out from underneath the deep grey wool.

Merlin stands behind the stumps, feeling foolish as he watches Arthur smirking like some magnanimous tyrant at his people and then laughing at a joke one of the knights made. God, Arthur’s fucking gorgeous. Merlin’s heartbeat speeds up, even though Arthur probably won’t deign to acknowledge him in public. Gone are the days where he’d go out of his way to fuck with Merlin, instead choosing to pretend Merlin’s not even worth a glance. Merlin ducks his head and glares at the bails, hands in the pockets of the blazer that he refuses to take off outside. He’s just a speck of misted dust buffeted about by Arthur’s breath. He’s just a piece of lint in Arthur’s pocket. He should beg off and just smoulder in his classroom, all alone.

“Hey,” he hears. It’s Gwen. She’s standing next to him, hand on his arm, but Merlin has no idea when she got here. “D’you want me to take over for you?”

It was never as if Arthur’s dislike (what a fucking understatement) was a secret from everyone. Merlin should’ve expected Gwen to be _Gwen_ about all this: cloyingly understanding at the best of times. Merlin can’t bear to face the pity in her eyes.

“Yeah, I’d like that. I’ll go sit with Frey then,” Merlin says, leaning in to kiss her on the cheek. “Cheers, Gwen.”

“Guinevere,” Arthur says, choosing that moment to walk over to them. Merlin freezes. (He’s got to leave. He’s got to go, but his body won’t move. Gooseflesh spreads across his arms and his heart thunders in his chest. He can’t breathe. This is what heart failure must feel like.) Merlin hovers like a ghost in the background, side character in his own story, as Arthur dips and catches Gwen’s hand in his, kissing her knuckles grandly like they’re in a fucking regency romance. “You look lovely, as always.”

“Thanks, Arthur,” Gwen replies without a hint of red on her cheeks. She’s immune to Arthur’s smile, and his words, and his charm. Merlin doesn’t know if he wants to be immune, too, or if he wants Arthur to turn that smile, those words on him. Envy sits bitter on the back of his tongue. He swallows it down.

“Oi, King Arthur, hands off my sister,” one of Arthur’s mates calls. It’s Elyan, but he’s grinning. Arthur squeezes Gwen’s hand briefly and lets it go, winking at her — Gwen blushes _now_ — then flips Elyan two fingers, sauntering back to his mates. So fucking _cool_. Every rise and fall of his chest, every blink of his eyes is a masterclass in grace.

Merlin turns abruptly and goes to sit with Freya, ignoring the calls for the umpire to go flip a coin and decide the first team to bat. Gwen’ll take care of it. She takes care of _every_ thing, doesn’t she? There’s space in her heart for each broken little toy she finds, the faded journals with half the pages ripped out, all the tattered Merlins in the world.

* * *

 

Arthur takes off part way into the match towards the storage shed by the pavilion, muttering something about bust knee pads. Merlin can see that that’s bullshit — Arthur’s fucking _royalty_ where this school’s concerned, and he’s always got priority access to the best equipment. Merlin can also see the flicker of Arthur’s eyes towards him as he walks past, and just like that, his mind’s made up.

He does nothing. Sits there, hollers with Freya at the fall of every wicket and makes up chants that have them both in fits. Arthur doesn’t return from the storage shed. Merlin doesn’t think about it.

And yet when the period ends, he lingers behind the rest of his classmates and doubles back, cursing himself for being so weak. What the fuck is wrong with him, fuck, why does he do this to himself, why —

The door to the shed is stuck closed. Merlin kicks at it to no avail. Fuck. _Fuck_. Probably a sign from the universe. Arthur prolly went back another way without Merlin seeing, and Merlin’s paying for trying to resist being Arthur’s desperate little whore, and isn’t his acknowledgement of this farce just exquisite?

He can’t afford to miss the next class. He should go back now, take his seat, and not think about how he’s almost immune to all the humiliation of being in love with Arthur Pendragon now. He really should, but then there’s a shadow on the door and it’s not his and Merlin’s surprised at how intimately he knows the smell and feel of Arthur against his back.

“Thought you weren’t going to come,” Arthur says, and Merlin’s cock twitches just from his _voice_ because he’s a fucking slut for Arthur. He swallows and turns around.

“Didn't want to,” he says, staring at the small gaps between the buttons on Arthur’s school shirt. The white shirt’s a close fit on him, athletic and muscular that he is, and he’s got rid of the gloves and other cricket equipment. He hasn’t got his blazer on. Merlin can see Arthur’s hard nipples through the near-transparent fabric and he can’t help himself, he slides two fingers into one of the gaps and touches warm skin with a small sigh.

“Yeah?” Arthur whispers, suddenly hoarse. He hasn’t knocked Merlin’s arm away yet. Merlin keeps forgetting he won’t do that now. “So what are you doing here?”

“Debasing myself.” Merlin doesn’t take his eyes off his fingers under the shirt, curling them and stroking whatever he can reach. It’s a fucking miracle that Arthur isn’t even deriding him right now.

Arthur smiles and undoes the buttons hindering Merlin, slow and deliberate. Merlin’s entire hand disappears under the shirt, and he brushes against a taut nipple and _hungers_ for even more, so he grabs Arthur’s collar and uses it as leverage, leans up to kiss him —

“No,” Arthur says, shoving Merlin off, and it feels like a fucking knife in his gut.

“What? Why?”

“The shed, we might get caught in the open here,” Arthur starts, already going over to the door that refused to bend to Merlin’s force, shouldering it open with a grunt, wiping his hand on his trousers because he can afford to dirty them like that. Merlin stares at Arthur’s hands a little too long. “Did I almost break your heart there, Wyllt?”

He disappears in the relative darkness inside the shed and Merlin follows because now there’s no question he always will.

He closes the door behind him, scarily not minding if he gets locked in with Arthur forever, and reaches for the outline of his beloved — beloved _what_ — that he can make out in the dim light that’s coming in through the high vent. The musty scent of various sports equipment and spare groundsman’s tools pervades the air but not even the damp chill can deter them when the game’s begun.

“Lance likes you,” Arthur says, apropos of nothing, letting Merlin take his hand and rub his thumb over his knuckles. “Really likes you. Falls out with me sometimes, can’t understand what I’ve got against you.”

“Lancelot,” Merlin chokes out, kissing the back of Arthur’s hand on a whim, embarrassment crawling hot over his shoulders when Arthur snorts. “He’s fit as hell.” One of Arthur’s knights. Has the kindest smile when he looks at Merlin and curls Merlin thinks would be nice to caress. Has Arthur’s trust and loyalty.

The laughter dies abruptly. “Yeah, he’s not bad-looking. But he’s not the one you love, Wyllt.”

“No, but neither are you.”

“You stubborn little _prick_!” Arthur squeezes Merlin’s hand, their sole point of contact. God, they could be secret lovers (they fucking _are_ ), secret lovers skiving class to meet up for a puppy-love tryst. Merlin closes his eyes to fight off the familiar sting of tears. They don’t even go hard and fast at it anymore. They _talk_ before they fuck. They seduce each other, get each other hot and dying for it. They kiss. Arthur kisses Merlin so often, so deeply it’s as if the taste of Merlin’s mouth matters more to him than the bloody orgasms and only lovers (should) have that and Arthur is decidedly anything _but_ someone who loves Merlin.

“Lancelot du Lac or me?” Arthur asks, encroaching Merlin’s personal space and cupping Merlin’s arse. “Who’d you rather shag?”

“Lance by a mile,” Merlin says, ’cause he’s a fucking liar.

“Fuck off to him, then!” Arthur spits, pushing Merlin away. Merlin’s heart leaps at the sour words — pathetic, looking for hope in breadcrumbs — and, well, the game’s still ongoing.

“Yeah, I’m missing class anyway,” he mutters.

Arthur’s by far the better player; he doesn’t do anything to stop Merlin as he tugs the door open, the brightness rushing in almost blinding. Or maybe Arthur just really doesn’t give a fuck and Merlin’s been deluding himself because it’s what people in love do. Merlin’s not very good at this. He should give up.

He can’t resist turning for one last look, as if that’ll change anything, suddenly make Arthur come to his senses and realise that his torment of Merlin all these years has been his repressed true love unhealthily expressing itself, cue happy ending, roll credits. And apparently, Arthur can’t resist a parting shot either.

“Not sure he’d be too chuffed about having it off with my leftovers.”

Merlin’s face crumples.

Arthur’s goes smoothly blank.

He gets to Merlin before Merlin can escape; pulls him into the shed again and slams the door closed, as if he doesn’t care if someone comes investigating and finds the Head Boy skiving or if they can’t get out again, and crowds him against the cold iron. Merlin struggles, punches Arthur’s chest, pushing and elbowing whatever he can reach, anything to stop him seeing the tears rolling down his face, but Arthur can hold him firm with just a grip on his wrists, fingertips touching, thumb over his middle fingernail —

“Merlin,” Arthur snaps. “ _Mer_ lin. Stop.”

“No, go away,” Merlin cries, strangled. Does his meagre strength even register to Arthur? He’s skin and bones compared to his sunlight Apollo and things are rapidly spiralling out of his control and oh fucking _fuck_ he’s alone with his bully in a distant outhouse and no one’ll come looking for him, no one but Will at the end of the day, will he find black eyes and bruised ribs — “Don’t hurt me, please, I swear I’ll leave you alone now, please don’t be who you were again —”

“God, Merlin, I’m not — _listen to me_ — okay, fine!” Arthur lets go and steps back, hands raised and the most ashen Merlin’s ever seen him. “Fine. Go.”

Merlin goes, but after him. They’re kissing, then, starving for it. Arthur isn’t even trying to get Merlin’s kit off, he’s just giving Merlin the kind of searching, shivery kisses with his tongue behind Merlin’s teeth that get him aching in his pants, and that’s all Arthur’s focusing on, and Merlin might come from that alone.

He does, jerking in Arthur’s arms, then going limp. There’s stunned silence for a minute.

“Wyllt,” Arthur whispers, holding him up. “You came?”

Merlin sniffles, leaning forward to rest his forehead on Arthur’s shoulder. The tears won’t stop.

“Oh. Oh, Jesus. Merlin. Merlin, you’re so unbelievable. C’mon, get on the ground for me.”

Arthur crawls over Merlin once they’re flat on the wood floor. Merlin doesn’t want to think about how dirty his blazer’s going to get, what the dry-cleaning bills are going to look like. The floor’s damp and a bit cold but Arthur’s like a furnace on top of him, suckling his neck, breaking his capillaries and making love bites (Merlin doesn’t miss the irony) bloom in his wake.

“Who were you thinking of?”

Merlin can’t fathom any of the words, gently scratching the insides of Arthur’s elbows. Arthur’s undoing both their trousers. Merlin’s still soft but he knows he won’t be much longer. The come’s cooling in his pants and it feels disgusting. Arthur seems to want to take a peek at it and Merlin’s worried he’s going to declare that it’s nasty.

“Lancelot?”

“What?”

“Did you want it to be him snogging you when you came?” Arthur pulls down Merlin’s pants to his knees and fuck, his arse is cold now, and his cock, and the come —

“What, no, why?”

“Came for me, then?”

Merlin inhales. Arthur shuffles backwards. He’s so hard, Merlin can see it even in the dimness, and he wants to choke on it but Arthur has other plans.

“Not for you,” he answers, watching Arthur watch his groin.

“Liar.”

“No.”

“Such a transparent liar when you want to be,” Arthur murmurs, and then he bends and takes Merlin into his mouth.

* * *

 

Merlin’s watch says they’ve been here for an hour now. Missed another period. The headmaster’s going to want to see him if he misses yet another one. There’s no one searching for him, not yet, because this is a boarding school and students skive off all the time to lounge in their dormitories and watch the telly and invite the day students to see what it’s like to be rid of your family. Merlin’s on scholarship, however, and he can’t miss classes like this. He’s very unofficially not allowed to be anything less than ideal.

Just once, though, just this once he’ll snatch this moment from the film reel of his life and keep it to himself. This farce where Arthur Pendragon is pretending to be all his, blowing him like he was born to suck (only Merlin’s) cock, rubbing the tip of his tongue against the underside of the head, getting it all wet with his spit and then lapping at his balls one after the other, swallowing him down suddenly, making all these fucking _filthy_ sounds almost on purpose, slurping and sucking and groaning until Merlin’s coming down his throat again.

“I’ve,” Merlin begins, and keens when Arthur idly laves his oversensitive cock. “I’ve a question for you.”

Arthur hums. He’s stripped his shirt off; it’s in Merlin’s hands, the primary source of Arthur’s scent for now.

“You’re straight.”

Arthur hums again. Merlin’s toes curl and he shivers, panting lightly. His first ever blow job. Done by someone who isn’t even interested in cocks but sucks one like a practised whore. Not that Merlin would know what technique feels like compared to sloppy, unartistic slavering.

“You could have any girl in the school without trying.” The memory of Gwen blushing almost has him pushing Arthur off, but as if he knows what Merlin’s going to do, Arthur slides a hand under Merlin’s shirt to press softly on his stomach, dipping his thumb into his navel. “You’re Arthur Pendragon. So many other boys want you, too. Why not them? Why me?”

“So many fucking questions, Wyllt.” Arthur drags himself up Merlin’s torso and licks across Merlin’s lips. Merlin’s tongue emerges to brush against Arthur’s. His come is so salty. Will Arthur taste like that, too? Will Arthur fuck Merlin’s mouth if he begs for it?

“You _swallowed_ my —” Only lovers do that, should do that, right? It isn’t even as if Arthur needs to be polite around him. It’s fucking with Merlin’s head. Arthur’s always fucking with him.

“Don’t read too much into that. Just didn’t want to get dirty.”

“So why don’t you get a girlfriend and shag her instead? Or a boy? Someone you don’t loathe the very sight of?” Look, Mum, a civil conversation with my bully. Are you proud? Would you cry if you knew?

Arthur takes his shirt from Merlin and tosses it aside. He presses a luxurious kiss to the corner of Merlin’s jaw, licking up a stray tear. “Big words, big boy.” Merlin closes his eyes. Arthur’s lips brush over his eyelashes. “Feels so much better to get off with someone who you _know_ loves you,” he continues. “They’re so eager to please you and it shows. They spread their legs for you, let you do anything to them as long as they can be the only thing in your world for a while. They become your private whore. They fuck you so well.”

Merlin’s bones are liquid at this point — Arthur’s sucked about five climaxes out of him by now and he wouldn’t move even if he could. The haze of _oh God_ and _so good_ and _so fucking good_ is what makes Merlin speak without thinking.

“I do love you.”

Arthur stills above him. Merlin only vaguely takes notice of this.

“I’ve loved you forever. I don’t know why you hate me so much. I love you still. Not who you are around me, because I’d have to be fucking mental to want _that_ and sometimes I think I am, y’know, mental, ’cause you turn me on all the time, but I love who you are around your knights, Pendragon, I love who you are around Lancelot.”

Arthur bites Merlin’s chin at the name. Merlin’s not going to think about it. He’s not going to let himself hope.

“I go to sleep at night hoping you’re not being yourself around me, but it’s so hard to fake hatred like yours, so I s’pose I’ll never find out what it’s like to be _liked_ by you, the way you like Gwen and Sophia and Vivian and Mithian. But I’d rather have you like this than not at all, y’know?”

“Yeah,” Arthur says roughly. “You’re my cockslut now, for me to use as I like.” He straddles Merlin’s bare chest — Merlin doesn’t remember when exactly he undressed, only that Arthur dug his nails into his nipples and did obscene things to them that made him whine and sob — and wanks himself, quick and noisy. Merlin watches lazily, and smiles. He’s not the one who spent the best part of an hour with a dick in his mouth.

“Love you,” he whispers, reaching out to caress Arthur’s hair. Arthur ducks his head, letting him. It parts under his fingers like silk; Merlin might get addicted. “Love who you are around other people, so much. Why can’t you be garden-variety nice to me, you fucked-up bastard?”

“Plot holes are ten a penny in real life. Would you love me if I were?” The glittering blue of Arthur’s eyes is celadon in the subdued vent light.

“We’ll never know,” Merlin says, craning his neck up and sticking his tongue out, straining to taste the precome flicking off Arthur’s cockhead.

Arthur groans, so insanely beautiful, grabs Merlin’s hair and pulls just enough for it to prickle, and comes with a shuddering moan, splattering Merlin’s face with white, deliberately missing his lips.

“Arsehole,” Merlin mutters. It’s so hard to care.

“Gonna lick it off you,” Arthur says under his breath, and it’s so very sexy, more than it ought to be. He follows through on the promise; Merlin steals a kiss here and there, savouring the painfully gentle rasp of Arthur’s mouth over his forehead and philtrum, and wonders what he’ll do about class and going home and friends and his mum, how he’ll explain the state of his clothes, his fucking face, how he’ll ever look anyone in the eye again.

“D’you think you could ever love _me_?” he asks on a whim. Arthur laughs as he buttons Merlin’s shirt up. Fondles him before doing up his trousers, eliciting a keen sigh from Merlin, and hauls him up.

“You joking? I’ve told you before, you’re just a really good shag ’cause you’re mad for me.”

Merlin bites his lip. The chill in the air floods him through as he observes Arthur putting himself back together.

“I’ll see you around, Wyllt. Don’t go fancying my mates, now,” Arthur says, not even sparing him a last glance or a goodbye kiss, brushing himself off, and just — just leaves, like that, like they weren’t wrapped around each other for ages just now.

The knife in Merlin’s stomach twists, bleeding all his shameful hope from him; he stands in the light his Phoebus left behind, lonelier than ever.


	5. head in the clouds but my gravity's centred

_four_

 

Merlin rushes into the bathroom next door to his bedroom with his uniform and a towel before his mum can see the marks on his body. The door shuts loudly — too loudly — so he shouts out a quick apology, locking the door and hiding the snick in his _sorry_. His mum would be suspicious if she heard it, and she’d ask about it later, and Merlin doesn’t want to lie to her. Merlin’s never locked doors in this house before.

He faces the mirror and swallows at what he sees. In the morning, all the love bites look even worse. Smattered over his chest, gathering close to his collarbones; Merlin looks like he was mauled.

Fuck.

Merlin sighs, and shivers in the next instant. Arthur’s an animal and Merlin is helpless to resist.

It’s — it’s not normal, is it? That Merlin likes looking like this? That he likes that these reminders of Arthur’s mouth fast over his skin sting when he presses down on them? They’re imprints of Arthur, nipping and licking and taking the time to suck all these stains onto him. They’ll fade soon enough, but Merlin likes knowing that Arthur _wanted_ to leave them on him; they aren’t things you do by accident.

Even then, he’ll have to hide them at school; he can’t walk around like this. He might have lost all his dignity in front of Arthur, but at school he still has people he cares about his image in front of, Will and Freya and Daegal and bloody Morris, who’s the reason Merlin’s up to his ears in all this shit. It’s unfair to blame him and outright nasty to want to go back in time but Merlin sometimes wishes he’d just ducked his head and looked the other way. Not stood up to Goliath like his mum raised him to do.

Arthur would prolly taunt him about the love bites he himself fucking left, anyway. How do his friends and lackeys think he’s anything less than a fucking monster? Merlin’s worthless to them. Charity case. Deserves it for daring to track his muddy footprints in our hallowed institution, the provincial.

What sort of monster is Merlin himself for _still_ wanting Arthur?

He showers quickly, brushing his teeth in the stall to save time. Pulls on his uniform and ducks back into his room to snatch a muffler before thundering down to the kitchen for breakfast. He’s late — he’s well able to wake up and get going in time, but the Head Boy and Girl are only at the gates to catch late-comers five minutes before assembly bell which means Merlin has to time himself, and even though he used to be a model student, these days he barely makes it. Because if he’s being pathetic, he might as well go all the way.

“Don’t forget to take these fairy cakes to school, cariad,” Hunith says, dropping a white paper bag on the table. “Give them to Will.”

“Yes, mum,” Merlin says around a mouthful of cornflakes. Swallows and continues, “He wants me to stay over at his so we c’n go celebrate his birthday in London.”

“Go on, then. I’m sure you’re tired of seeing stuffy old me and Uncle Gaius for days on end.”

“Tomorrow night okay?”

“I’m not going to be home to pack your clothes today, you’ll have to do it yourself.”

“Got it,” Merlin chirps. “Thanks, mum.” He happily accepts the kiss Hunith plants at his temple, barely taking in her _I’ll leave some money near the door_ before bolting out of the house for the bus.

He makes it, but only just.

At the school gates he joins the stragglers rushing to make it to class before the bell rings. Arthur and Mithian are standing there, looking sharp in their uniforms, badges gleaming on their chests. Mithian was born to be a model; the way she carries herself in clothes as simple as a dark pleated skirt and a blazer, with ballet shoes and a ribbon tying her hair up, it’s too regal for her age, she’s too beautiful. Merlin would’ve fancied her had he not been _owned_ by Arthur Pendragon.

“Wyllt,” comes Arthur’s voice, whip-crack harsh. Merlin startles. He’d only been hoping for a momentary glance at his beloved monster. “Over here.”

“What’s this?” Arthur says, once Merlin’s found his way out of the hurrying crowd. A sneaky glance at Arthur’s watch says there’s two minutes to bell. “This isn’t part of the uniform, you can’t wear this inside.” He means the muffler.

Merlin winds it tighter around his neck. “It’s bloody glacial out,” he tries.

“There’s heaters inside. They’re not in the habit of torturing us.”

“I can’t take this off,” Merlin tries again. He thinks wretchedly of the fairy cakes in his bag, the assembly line he’s got to get into, the friend waiting for him inside, and flinches as Arthur pulls the scarf down.

Arthur stares at the marks for a long minute. “Mine?” he mutters, drawing closer. “Are these mine?”

“Who else’s?” Merlin retorts, and swallows as icy fingertips press against the blood-purple bites. Is Mithian still nearby? Can she hear them? What’s she going to think?

“They look… fuck.” Arthur takes a deep breath, shakes his head.

“Are you going to apologise?”

“Fuck no,” Arthur murmurs, still running his fingers up and down Merlin’s neck, hiding them from view with his body. “I couldn’t possibly.” Takes a few steps backwards and says, louder, “Fine, but just for today, ’cause I can’t have the charity case catching a cold on my account. Go on, then.”

Merlin’s face burns, not just from the wind whipping his cheeks, and he starts to run.

“You’re always so mean to Merlin Wyllt,” he hears Mithian saying, her soft words flying around him, buoyed by the callous breeze that wants him to overhear. “You know Lancelot adores him — can’t you be kinder for his sake?”

“He does _not_ fancy that runt,” Arthur snaps instantly. “Don’t tell me what to do, Mith.”

* * *

 

Merlin’s been able to avoid conversations with Will about his drastic change in behaviour until now with excuses about GCSEs and stress, but with the fairy cakes sitting on the desk between them and the sugar powder coating his fingers, he can’t help having this one.

“It’s been a bit too long since we’ve had a good chat,” Will says, chewing with his mouth open. Merlin wrinkles his nose at the sight, and Will guffaws. He sobers up too quickly for Merlin’s liking, though, and continues, “You look downright awful, mate. What’s been going on?”

“Nothing.” It’s so easy to lie and pretend. Easier than exposing the Head Boy’s homosexual tendencies or his own damaged self-esteem. “Exams’ve been —”

“I _will_ smash this into your face and beg Mrs Wyllt’s pardon later.”

Merlin laughs. Will would never. “Okay, fine. Look. I’ve not had a good time of it recently.”

“Oh, really.”

“Shut up! Just a few run-ins with Pendragon, ’s all.”

“You serious?” Will asks, alarmed all of a sudden. “You fucking serious? What’s he been doing to you?”

 _Devouring my mouth._ _Sucking my cock so good I come five times in an hour._ “He’s being an arse, so nothing new. It’s just — he’s just so fucking —” _hot, I want him but I hate him but I love him but I wish he were sweeter._

“Merlin, I’m all for solving problems without getting the beaks involved, but you need to tell someone.”

“And what, risk Headmaster Pendragon snatching my scholarship away? Kicking me out?”

“Fair. His dad literally fucking runs this place,” Will says, slumping in his chair. “This is bollocks. He’s such a dick.”

“Yeah.” Merlin probably won’t tell Will it’s his fault, everything that’s been going on, that with just a prudent, shut mouth Merlin could’ve loved the arsehole Head Boy in secret and never had a taste of heaven submerged in hell, wouldn’t have to walk around living two lives.

“Don’t tell me you still have a hard-on for him.”

Or maybe he will, right fucking now.

“Y’know _what_ , Will, I never should’ve told you anything —” he starts, rage swirling up in his gut, but then they’re joined in the lunch hall by Daegal, Freya, and Gwen. The noisy chatter that bubbles up instantly dispels the unsettled look on Will’s face along with Merlin’s anger.

“Help yourself,” Merlin says, inclining his head towards the cakes. Daegal, who’s probably closest to him after Will and Freya, doesn’t.

“You look like shit.” He frowns. Gwen glances at them both.

“I just told him that!” Will bursts out.

“Yeah, well, exams,” Merlin says, and with a shrug changes the topic.

Arthur glares when Merlin and Freya pass him in the corridor to go back to their classroom, and makes to leave his knights, approaching them, but then one of the knights outpaces him.

“Merlin Wyllt!” Gwaine exclaims, and Merlin’s heart throbs painfully at the complete lack of malice. Arthur’s friends have never really got involved in the one-sided vendetta before. They just look on, unconcerned; not that Merlin ever had the opportunity to observe them whilst Arthur was around. He’d thought they wouldn’t think much of him, either.

Gwaine winds a crushing arm round Merlin’s shoulders and, before Merlin can protest, drags him over to the group. Merlin feels his stomach swooping low, every bit of happiness he’d scrounged up and sheltered in his throat dissipating as they get closer and closer to all the _cool_ Year 13s. A desperate glance backwards shows Freya frozen in her tracks, eyes wide with panic. Merlin hates this fucking school.

“Sorry about the kidnapping, mate, but Lance here has something he wants to say.” With a clap on the back and a shove towards Lancelot, Gwaine withdraws.

“Oh, God,” Lancelot says, clearly as taken aback as Merlin. “Gwaine, you bastard! Merlin, I’m so sorry. I didn’t ask him to do this —”

“No, yeah,” Merlin hastens to reply. Why is Lancelot du Lac being kind to him? “Don’t worry about it, what’d you want to say to me?”

“Nothing urgent, I swear, my friends are berks, sorry,” and Lance’s eagerness to put Merlin at ease somehow _works_ and now Merlin’s beaming even though Arthur Pendragon is right next to Lance, expression thunderous. “You don’t have to go along with this, Merlin, but I wanted to know if you’d perhaps like to have a coffee up in my room after last class today. Mr Monmouth mentioned you’re already having a third go at GCSE mocks and —”

“Oh, yeah, he told me you could help me with History and Modern Foreign Languages!” Merlin brightens at the thought of getting a leg up in his exam prep, _yessss_ , he can’t wait to tell his mum and Uncle Gaius —

“He’s not interested,” Arthur snarls. Merlin flinches, but it’s not aimed at him, it’s… it’s at _Lancelot_. “Come the fuck on, du Lac, you can pull better than the likes of him.”

“Arthur,” Lance sighs. “I’ve told you I’m not trying to pull Merlin.”

“And it’d be none of your beeswax if he were, King,” Gwaine cuts in. They all call Pendragon _King_. Right. “Not like you’ve got your eye on our darling Wyllt, eh?”

Merlin feels like he’s detached from reality, floating in himself, watching these upper sixths play a game he doesn’t know the rules of. “Erm, what?”

“Never mind, Merlin,” Leon says, smiling. “It’s nothing you’ve done.” He probably means the smile to be kind and friendly, but it comes off as pitying. Merlin has to close his eyes for the revulsion that rises in him like sick.

“I’m going to go, now,” he says, slow, wondering if he’ll shock himself, start shouting at these posh fucks who prolly think they’re doing him a favour by deigning to talk to him, get him involved in their banter, be nice to him when their leader is a total bastard. “Lancelot, if it’s okay with you, I’d love to meet up after school ends. I’ll see you at the huge staircase that leads up to the dorms.”

He turns before he gets a reply from any of them, almost runs back to Freya who, bless her soul, waited for him. His chest is threatening to crack open, shame and anguish raring to pour out. Hawthorn’ll bloom between his broken ribs and he’ll bury himself in the ground. He hates this place. He hates these people. He wants — he _wants_ Arthur right now. He wants to hug Arthur, even though he’ll be shoved off and spat at, he wants Arthur’s hands on him. He wants Arthur to tell him why he’s so furious about Lancelot. Why it can’t possibly be what Merlin’s hoping it is.

Freya takes his hand and squeezes it tightly. She’s not magic but she always stitches together all of Merlin’s wounds. Merlin hates her a tiny bit, too. Everything, even the fact that he resents her being nice to him because it inevitably looks likes pity even when a rational part of Merlin knows it’s just a good person being good, but loving Arthur Pendragon has fucked with him so thoroughly that he might as well have passed through the looking glass where his sanity’s concerned.

* * *

 

Lancelot’s room isn’t a single. Merlin had been expecting a single, but it seems there are rich people and then there are _rich_ people, and Lancelot is of the former sort.

“We were all lucky and got grouped into singles and doubles in a close cluster of rooms when we first came to Camelot,” Lancelot explains. “The singles are all on the left side of the corridor and the doubles on the right. Something about the size of the rooms and the architecture of the school.”

“So, definitely not Hogwarts.”

“Unfortunately not,” Lancelot says, laughing. Merlin stands awkwardly at the entryway as Lance flits around the room, tossing papers and books here and there. “Arthur and Gwaine are the two rooms right opposite Percy and mine, and Elyan and Leon’s. Safe to say the matrons’re much too much familiar with the sixth floor corridor boys.”

“Will’s on the fourth,” Merlin says, apropos of nothing. He’s not thinking about how Arthur slammed his door shut just as Merlin and Lance came up to Lance’s. Arthur looks smart in his uniform, but fucking fantastic when it’s dishevelled. “He says lower forms aren’t allowed to come up to the uppers’ dorms.”

“On their own, but they can if they’re accompanied by a senior, like today. Okay, here, Percy won’t mind you using his chair.”

Percy had decided to go bother Gwaine for the duration that Merlin was in his room. He was… Merlin doesn’t know how to put it. Not bad, or scary. Merlin sits in his chair and rolls himself over to Lancelot’s desk, where Lance’s got a fat textbook and two mugs of tea waiting.

“Make yourself at home,” Lance says, smiling gently at Merlin, and that smile is so disarming that Merlin doesn’t think twice before taking his blazer and jumper off and hanging them over the back of the chair, unwinding his cumbersome muffler —

“Whoa, Merlin, what are _those_?”

Ah, fuck. He’d forgotten about them. The muffler had been so comfy that he’d forgotten why he was using it. He stares Lance in the eye, mouth half-open as if to offer up some excuse (yes, lions), but nothing comes forth for a good long minute before Lance takes pity on the stupid Year 11.

“Never mind. You don’t need to explain anything to me.” Lancelot shakes his head, grabbing his pencil and doodling something on the corner of the page he’s got the textbook open to. “Just — can I ask you one question?”

Merlin nods.

“Is Arthur forcing you to do it with him?”

“ _God_ , no,” Merlin says, choking on his spit. “No. He’d never.”

“He’d never do it with you, or he’d never force you?”

“Both.”

“Come on, Merlin.”

“Really,” Merlin forces out, unease creeping in. Is this the real reason Lancelot got Merlin alone? “You’ve seen for yourself how much he hates the very sight of me.” The words dig into his throat as they come out. “You can’t think he’d ever touch me, or that I’d ever let him.”

He grabs his satchel, ready to leave if Lancelot presses the issue.

“It’s none of my business,” Lance says. “I’m sorry. I just see the way he looks at you, Merlin, and it’s not what you think it is at all. He’d eat you up if he could, and I worry about you because — because —”

“No,” Merlin says, weakly. “No, Arthur would rather I were dead in a ditch than anywhere near him.”

Such morbid conversation. When did Merlin become this way? He wasn’t a naïve blooming flower just exposed to the cruel world before, but he’d never just accepted the darkness before or let it in. He’d been happy as he could be before Arthur had found out about his feelings, and now he passes through time like a lost wraith.

Lancelot senses Merlin’s anguish — hopefully it’s not writ large on Merlin’s face — and shuts up instantly, shame radiating from his hunched figure and pursed lips. Vindictiveness flashes in Merlin before shame just like Lancelot’s takes its place.

The spontaneous study session lasts for two awkward hours, somehow, before Gwaine barges in on them with Percy in tow, looking bored. Merlin leaps for his scarf and blazer.

“Where’s the loos?” he asks no one, hurrying out without waiting for an answer, bag slung over his back. He’s not going to return to that room with the judgemental, noble boy who thinks he can fix Merlin by being his friend, protect him from the big bad wolf. He’s going to go home and pack for the following day’s overnight stay in Will’s room and read up on the transformation of curves and do his homework and make dinner for him and his mum and an extra portion for Uncle Gaius because his visits are always unexpected, and he’s going to pretend he’s happy and that his GCSEs are all he cares for and he’s going to cry when it’s too dark at night for anyone to hear him, touch the bite marks on his neck and yearn for someone living a very different life somewhere else. It’s so lonely, being in love with someone like Arthur Pendragon. No one’s going to be there to pick him up when he eventually hits rock bottom, or Arthur hurls him to it. Go home, Merlin, you poor sod.

He doesn’t. His feet don’t listen to him, his hands disobey his wishes and follow his stupid heart —

He closes Lance’s door behind him firmly and then knocks on Arthur’s.

* * *

 

Arthur opens the door immediately. He definitely wasn’t expecting to see Merlin; his clothes are a wrinkled wreck, tie nowhere to be seen, trousers clearly undone under the shirttails. All the colour drains from his face as he sees Merlin standing there expectantly.

“What,” he says, voice pitched low and dangerous, “the fuck do you want?”

“Let me in,” Merlin answers. “And I’ll tell you what the fuck I want.”

“du Lac had enough of you?” Arthur sneers, still quiet. Or maybe he’s speaking normally and it’s Gwaine being a noisy fuck in Lancelot’s room. “Used you until he got sick of you?”

“Don’t you want to find out?” Merlin retorts with bravery he barely feels. “Put a finger up there and feel his come dripping out?”

Arthur’s nostrils flare. Merlin’s heart leaps.

“Did you really?” Arthur murmurs.

“Let me in and find out.”

It’s Merlin’s nervous glance behind him, at the sole physical barrier between Arthur’s mates and them that makes Arthur step aside. Merlin walks in, dropping his satchel by the entrance, and takes it in.

“So this is what a single room’s like,” he marvels. “You minted bastards have it all.”

A luxurious four-poster exactly like in the Harry Potter films with sheets that prolly feel like heaven, and a lovely desk Merlin wants to sit at and run his hands all over, and an armoire with a mirror and a large window with a fucking potted plant on the sill. It’s glorious but it’s a mess, just like Merlin’s room. Fuck. To the detriment of Merlin’s heart, Arthur is so very human.

He hears Arthur close and lock the door behind him.

“I’m assuming you wanted me to lock it.”

“Yeah.”

Merlin has no plan. Hadn’t thought anything beyond _I need to see him_ and _I need to kiss him_ and _I need his hands on me_ and _he’s jealous, he has to be, is he really?_

So he takes a deep breath and turns to face Arthur. “Go on, then,” he says, spreading his arms wide.

Arthur half-smiles, scornful. “Want me to ravish you now that I’ve got you alone?”

Merlin takes another deep breath and nods. Arthur laughs outright at him this time.

“What the _hell_ do I have to do to —” he starts, then cuts himself off and runs a hand through his hair.

“What does that mean?” Merlin asks.

“Nothing,” Arthur says. Shakes his head. Smiles at Merlin, strangely melancholy. Merlin stares. That sort of pain has no business being on Arthur’s face, and Merlin can’t bear to see it. “Take your clothes off, Wyllt.”

“It’s not that you want to spare Lancelot du Lac from me,” Merlin says in a rush. Arthur moves in, wraps a strong arm around Merlin’s waist, pulling the muffler off with the other.

“Isn’t it?” One soft suckle over a previous mark. A twinge of pain. A lick up the side of Merlin’s neck, bold and vicious.

“No,” and Merlin sounds much too confident compared to the truth, which is that he would be quivering in his shoes from nerves if it weren’t from arousal. “It’s that you can’t bear to see me with anyone else, even though you hate me. You fucking detest me, but you want to own me.”

“Interesting hypothesis, but you’ve no proof.”

“I rode Lancelot just an hour ago in his bed.”

“No, you bloody  _didn’t_.”

“No, I didn’t, but you were furious when he invited me to his room because you thought he fancies me, because Head Girl Mithian and the rest all think he fancies me.”

“Does he?” Arthur’s kissing and sucking pauses, his mouth hovering over Merlin’s ear. “Does he fancy my whore?”

“Yeah,” Merlin breathes. It’s not a lie. It’s not the truth, but it’s not a lie, because Lancelot never clarified, and Merlin is too selfish to not take the chance he knows he’s never going to get again. “Wants to protect me from you. What a knight he is, betraying his king so.”

Arthur goes entirely still.

“Do you think you need to be protected from me?” he whispers, sliding his hands over Merlin’s arse, head still bent next to Merlin’s. “Am I the villain of your fairy tale?”

Big bad wolf. My, what a lovely voice you have, all the better to drown me with. “No, you’re the prince.”

“Charming.”

“You’re really fucking beautiful, y’know,” Merlin says, losing track of where the conversation was headed, or if it was headed anywhere at all. “I wank all the time to the thought of coming all over your face like you did mine, want to see it on your tongue, across your chest, your arse.”

Arthur kisses him; once, hard. They’re standing close enough that Merlin’s cock is snug against Arthur’s through their trousers and pants, hot and pulsing.

“You’re the prince. Why don’t you get a princess?”

“I told you before,” Arthur starts, but Merlin’s the one who kisses him this time. So much bravado. Somewhere in the back of his head is the real Merlin paralysed with terror that Arthur will get tired of this, kick him to the kerb soon enough.

“I know, it’s best when you’re shagging someone who loves you. Problem is, Arthur, everyone loves you. So why pick someone you loathe?”

“Wanna make sure you remember me for the rest of your life,” Arthur says, nuzzling Merlin’s face. “Hate your stupid horse face so much I’m gonna steal your kisses and blow you and eat your little arse out and mould it to the shape of my cock, and you’ll never forget me then, will you, Merlin, even when some other bloke’s balls-deep in you ten years from now?”

“Never ever going to forget you,” Merlin gasps, as Arthur swiftly unbuttons his shirt and pulls the wings apart, going straight for his nipples. So fucking sensitive there. “Love you too much.”

“Good,” Arthur spits, and tugs on Merlin’s teats and pinches and soothes them and makes a shivering wreck of Merlin in minutes. “Get on the bed,” he commands, hoarse, and Merlin _follows_ , clambering on. The sheets are just as blissfully soft as he’d imagined. He’s going to stain them with come, soon.

“Could you,” Merlin sighs, watching Arthur strip naked in under a minute, “pretend you love me, too? Just whilst we’re shagging? Please?”

Arthur gives him a long look, then, and Merlin is startled to recognise something terribly like pity in his eyes. No. Jesus, no, not pity. Not pity.

“Never mind,” he stammers. “Forget I said that.”

Arthur is painted golden even in the last of the evening light. “All right,” he says eventually. “You said nothing.”

And yet when he’s crawling on top of Merlin, helping him undress, he has the audacity to whisper, “You’re mine, aren’t you, Merlin? You’re all mine, and I’m all yours, ’cause we adore each other,” making Merlin’s eyes water and spill.


	6. touch my neck and i'll touch yours, you in those little high-waisted shorts (oh)

_five_

 

Curled up beside Will in his small dorm bed (no four-posters for this boy) after a ‘wild’ night on the town, trying on Will’s insistence to sneak into clubs and get pissed, Merlin dozes, half-awake. He’s ignoring the snores next to him — Will’s isn’t the warmth he wants to press up against — and the roommate on the other bed (Merlin doesn’t care to remember what his name is) when there’s a soft rap on the door that sends him shooting out of bed.

It’s Arthur, of course.

Some part of Merlin had known it was inevitable, like he’s the magnetic south pole to Arthur’s north and they can’t run from each other, if they’d ever even wanted to. Merlin hadn’t. Doesn’t. And only God knows about Arthur.

“Wyllt?” Arthur says, hoarse and uncertain.

“Curfew,” Merlin whispers back, trying to focus on the little he can see of Arthur’s face in the dimmed corridor lights; the stark outlines of his nose and jaw, and the dull glimmer in his eyes. He wants to trace all of it with his tongue. “Matron’ll rain hell down on you if she finds you.”

“ _Fuck_ curfew,” snaps Arthur, with feeling. Merlin flinches and doesn’t dare to check behind him on Will and the roommate. “I needed to see you.”

Merlin bites his lip to avoid asking why, and Arthur’s hand comes up to press it, once, twice, until Merlin opens up with a gasp and lets three fingers in, tasting salt and skin.

“Come up to mine,” Arthur says, pushing at the tip of Merlin’s tongue with his middle finger. “I need to get off.” He draws his hand out and sucks on the fingers he had just now in Merlin’s mouth. Merlin’s chest aches and aches. Just kiss me, Arthur. Just — kiss me.

“What if I say no?”

“Will you?”

“No,” Merlin says, and he shuts down all reason in his mind as Arthur pulls him towards himself so they’re both flush with each other, kissing quietly with little smacks and moans, and then Arthur’s hands are in Merlin’s pants, fisting and tugging on him. Merlin’s knees judder and he’s about to sag to the floor, bringing Arthur down with him when Arthur fucking _lifts_ him into his arms and books it upstairs, throwing all caution to the wind. Matron’ll scream. Merlin sways and jerks with each step and has little time to wonder if he’ll have to fess up to Will tomorrow — Arthur’s on the sixth floor already, what a fucking athlete, and they’re at _612 Pendragon_ and Merlin wants to hold onto the nameplate for the rest of his life and then there’s a door slam; in two seconds he’s on the bed in the dark room. He’s only been in it once before but he’d know these sheets anywhere, and now Arthur’s covered Merlin with his own body, kissing him as if he’s compelled, possessed.

“D’you like snogging me, Arthur?”

“Fuck you,” Arthur breathes, and doesn’t meet Merlin’s eyes as he licks the roof of Merlin’s mouth and crushes heavy kisses to the corners, his chin.

“Tell me,” Merlin begs, muffled under Arthur’s cheek. “Please. I want to know.”

Arthur pauses. He seems… closer tonight. Attainable. Breakable. He has a way of diminishing Merlin, making him feel small and worthless, but tonight it’s as if Merlin _matters_ to him, and that gives him strength. Arthur won’t throw him away tonight.

“I,” Arthur starts. Hides his face in the plane of Merlin’s neck, where it meets his shoulder. Merlin tilts his head so Arthur doesn’t feel hollow, unbeloved. He’s breathing hard, and it’s not the exertion of having to hold himself up with his arms. Merlin hesitantly strokes his head like a lover would, breathes him in, the scent of his fragrant sweat untouched by cologne or deodorant at three in the morning. The prickly ends of his hair strands feel like heaven on his fingers; his thumb glides over the curve of Arthur’s ear, easily rests against his pulse.

“Baby?” Merlin whispers.

Term of endearment. It just slipped out and now it’s gone and blown itself into fragments across Arthur’s golden hair, paralysing them both. How stupid of Merlin. Arthur’s three years older. So much stronger. He carried Merlin up two floors. Fuck. _Baby_.

Arthur groans. “I fucking love it.”

“Love what?” Merlin’s already forgotten, in the panic of possibly being kicked out of Arthur’s bed over a stupid word.

“Kissing you. I like it more than blowing you. And I’ll like it more than rimming you and fucking you.”

“Got a thing for my mouth?”

“Yeah,” Arthur sighs. The slump of his shoulders is revealing.

“Gonna tell me what’s wrong, darling?” Merlin tries, and Arthur fucking _shivers_.

“I fucking despise —” he starts, raising his head to stare directly at Merlin, but he doesn’t finish the sentence. The words are old and worn, flung at Merlin many times throughout the years in various constructions, but still they rip into his throat and silence him. Merlin tries to speak but there’s tears in his eyes now and he’s scared blood will spill from his mouth. So foolish. He’s waiting for the _you_ to tread on the heels of the _despise_ but he can’t bear to have it out there in the open where there’ll be evidence yet again of his foolishness so he doesn’t let Arthur finish.

“I knew that,” he says, struggling to keep his voice even but foundering. “I know that.”

For just a second, there is anguish on Arthur’s face at Merlin’s answer — a short second, a frozen moment slipped into a film reel, jarring and captivating. Merlin thinks it’s the exhaustion hoodwinking him into thinking Arthur cares.

“You know fuck-all,” Arthur snaps. “You know fucking _nothing_.” And yet he doesn’t move to tell Merlin to get out, he doesn’t stop anchoring Merlin, who feels so, so dizzy.

“No,” Merlin says. “I really don’t know anything.” He closes his eyes and releases the tension in his muscles, so fucking tired all of a sudden.

He wants to go home now.

He just wants to go home to his mum.

Home is not Arthur’s arms. Home is not Arthur’s bed. Home could never be Arthur’s awful hatred. Merlin tried building walls out of all those hateful insults, the contempt in Arthur’s eyes the roof over his head, but it’s all crumbled to nothing around him and he’s so exposed now; Arthur’s teeth could sever every bit of him from himself and he’d let them.

He tries to get out of bed, wondering if there’ll be other curfew-breakers who’ll see him leaving the Head Boy’s room at fuck o’clock in the morning and spread the gossip across the school until it reaches his mum and she gazes at him with sadness and pity and maybe shame. Merlin doesn’t know (where she went wrong). Merlin knows (she loves him). Merlin will go to a therapist (with her). Uncle Gaius knows a few people. Merlin will not be one of those people who keep it all in until they find salvation in shoelaces and bag straps and blissful darkness. Merlin wants to be happy so very, very much, and he knows he can be happy even with his heart used as shrapnel by a boy he loved — loves too much.

“Merlin, wait,” Arthur says, watching him search for his slippers, and he hates that he stops just because Arthur used his first name.

He hadn’t been wearing any slippers, anyway. Arthur carried him up without Merlin having to touch a single tile of the corridors.

“What?”

“My father’s going to summon you tomorrow.”

Merlin whirls around, heart in this throat, choking him. “Headmaster Pendragon? What? Why?”

Arthur turns on the lamp beside his bed, and sits on the edge. The light turns Arthur’s face to a silhouette. Merlin’s breath catches in his throat.

“He knows.”

“About?” says Merlin weakly, though of course he knows.

Arthur doesn’t bother to clarify, in any case. “He’ll summon you into his office and — and…”

Merlin waits, but Arthur doesn’t go on. The worst possible scenario worms its way into his head.

“Is he going to rusticate me?” he asks in barely more than a whisper. Uther Pendragon doesn’t have the authority to expel a scholarship student on his own — he’d need the backing of the governors and scholarship sponsors for that — but he doles out rustications as often as he can, and that on top of Merlin’s near-tardiness and missed classes would ruin his life.

Arthur swallows, and hangs his head. “No,” he says hoarsely. “I don’t think so. But he’s going to tell you something and I don’t want you to —” He breaks off again, and Merlin is no less anxious than he was earlier.

“Pendragon, _please_ ,” he shouts. Arthur flinches.

“He’ll tell you to stay away from me.”

Merlin draws up short.

“He’ll — yeah, he’ll tell you to bugger off and leave me alone, ’cause I don’t need a scandal with a _male_ commoner student two forms lower wrecking my chances at getting into Cambridge and marrying Elena Gawant Godwyn.”

“Oh.”

A nod.

Merlin’s eyes are closing on their own. He’s so tired. He’s going to die, slowly, in Arthur’s room. And then he realises Arthur never finished his sentence.

“You don’t want me to what?” he asks. Arthur starts.

“Don’t,” he says, “Don’t... give in. Say you’ll do what you want and he has no authority over you.” The ‘because he has too much authority over _me_ ’ goes unsaid, but Merlin doesn’t need Arthur to say it out loud.

“Why the fuck should I?” It’s a legitimate question and Merlin will not, not feel like shit for the way Arthur looks like he just got punched, colour draining from his face — Merlin only notices because his fucking hands go white, bunching the blankets so hard the wrinkles’ll last beyond the night. “You fucking despise me, you freely admit to using me, you don’t give a fuck what happens to my scholarship, you say you’ll never love me. I’ve done away with my dignity going along with you, but surely you don’t expect me to risk everything keeping me here for — a few desperate blowjobs with a bloke who used to aim footballs at the back of my head and groan if he missed.” He hates the way he sounds so breathy and upset.

Arthur inhales.

“Fair,” he grits out after a tense second. “Do what you want. Get out.”

Merlin doesn’t.

“I’m not responsible for the broken, pathetic creature with daddy issues that’s inside you, you know,” he says, vindictive, ashamed of himself the instant the last word stumbles out of his mouth.

Arthur opens his mouth — Merlin’s foot twitches, like it just kicked Arthur’s ribs in — and nothing. For a whole five seconds, as if Merlin crushed his soul. Merlin hadn’t meant to make him feel Merlin’s emotions. Does Arthur ever have guilt deadening his anger? Is Arthur human? Is Arthur Merlin’s? Would Arthur ever —

“Fuck off,” he says to Merlin. “Fuck off to your William and to Lance and Gwaine. Sit on their cocks, then.”

William has no bearing on any of this, and he’s a punchline to Lance and Gwaine, so this, this can be nothing but jealousy.

“I just might,” Merlin spits right back, and this feels too much like a break-up for his comfort (comfort!).

Does Arthur think it’s a break-up, too? Would he acknowledge this twisted farce of a relationship first?

Arthur turns away and gets into bed. Even under the multiple blankets, Merlin can see the tense, rigid form of his body. He’s waiting for Merlin to leave to… break down and cry? Forget all about Merlin and have a wank? Fuck. What the fuck has his life come to.

Merlin takes off his nightshirt. The rustle of the fabric against his skin is too loud.

“Get out.” Arthur’s voice quavers, stifled.

Off come the trousers, the pants.

“I’m undressed. How do I lock your door?” Merlin asks.

A beat; and then Arthur flings off the blankets to —

(kick Merlin out? Shove his clothes at him and choose his father after all?)

— to lock the door himself. Merlin stands there, naked, shivering, staring at the bed. He won’t be able to get it up for Arthur unless they’re curled around each other under all those toasty-looking sheets, on the softest mattress Merlin’s ever known.

“It’s warm in bed. C’mon.” Arthur’s hand is a searing heat on his tailbone. Merlin starts, and turns to embrace his imitation-boyfriend. Finds him eager for a kiss or two or ten. Arthur loves to kiss. The reminder jolts Merlin; he loves kissing Merlin’s mouth.

It’s not in any way a clean, practised act, and Merlin’s not experienced at all, is he, with Arthur his one and only partner; Merlin listens for the filthy sounds of their lips colliding, the wet that they’re sharing. Arthur’s tongue brushes against the underside of his and the painful thud of his pulse makes his legs buckle underneath him. Arthur huffs with laughter and it’s such a fucking relief for the lonely boy kissing the other, lonelier boy — he nips at Arthur’s chin, presses his mouth to Arthur’s upper lip, grabs Arthur’s hand and rubs it on his chest; Arthur instantly flicks his finger against Merlin’s nipple, pushes down on it, smiling and letting the kisses grow messier and lovelier as Merlin’s breath catches in his throat.

“Baby,” Merlin whispers.

“Baby,” Arthur whispers back, guard down.

“I’m in love with you.”

“That’s probably the one thing in my life I can depend on,” Arthur says, still smiling for some fucking reason — didn’t he hate it before? Didn’t he pity Merlin for giving his worthless heart to the wrong fucking person? — and kneels, engulfing Merlin’s cock in his mouth and _sucking_.

Merlin comes in about five seconds, pulling at Arthur’s hair, thick and soft and falling apart like silk between his fingers. Failing to warn him.

Arthur doesn’t mock him for it. He doesn’t spit.

“Why me,” he asks raggedly, before nudging Merlin backwards, walking on his knees. Merlin sits down heavily as the backs of his thighs hit the edge of the bed. “Why me, Merlin?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer, wrapping his fingers around Merlin’s ankles and lifting them up — “Hold your knees to your chest, Merlin,” he sighs, like the weight of the world lifts off him just a little bit more each time he utters Merlin’s name — and then leans in and licks and suckles at his hole. No circumspection for Arthur Pendragon.

“Oh, God,” Merlin sobs, nearly losing his grip on his knees and booting Arthur in the shoulder. “ _Arthur_.”

“Liked that?”

“Yeah, yeah, baby,” Merlin keens, “Do it again for me —”

— and Arthur buries his face in Merlin’s arse with a groan that sounds _pleased_ , and goes to town. Merlin can feel, feel it, visceral, the sensation of Arthur’s tongue swiping across his taint, the wetness of his spit that starts to cool every time Arthur leans away and then comes back as if drawn by magnets or gravity or something like love, changing the angle, the melting heat of his mouth where Merlin had never expected it in his wildest dreams to be — his head dipping again and again with intent — Merlin’s about to faint with how hard he is, how absolutely divine it feels to have his Arthur eating him out like this, fuck, if only he could _see_ Arthur’s head tucked in between his legs like that, fuck, God —

“Merlin.” Arthur pulls away and lightly slaps Merlin’s arse. Merlin jerks. “Touch yourself.”

“What?”

“Touch yourself,” Arthur commands, and Merlin obeys without question this time, getting awkward hold of his cock from behind his thigh and beginning to wank himself, whilst Arthur presses two fingertips against him and then pushes in, slow, tender.

It hurts a bit. Arthur draws out, and then fucks back in, kissing him right next to his hole, whispering things that Merlin can’t hear. They have no lube, and as if he’s telepathic, Arthur lets a line of spit drip from his mouth onto the fingers fucking in and out of Merlin, and Merlin clenches and bears down on them, and shudders as he _feels_ Arthur twist them, cross them, swivel them. It doesn’t hurt anymore.

“You’re making such lewd noises,” Arthur says roughly. “Can you even hear yourself? Why’re you so, God, why’re you so sexy? Did I find it, baby?” He licks a streak up Merlin’s cock, and sucks the leaking tip.

Merlin can’t answer. He’s a quivering, writhing mess, short of breath, because Arthur found it, the spot that’s making him go crazy, and Merlin can’t do anything but let go of his knee and grab Arthur’s wrist with the free hand, hoping he speeds up.

“You’re mine,” Arthur sighs. Merlin seizes, climaxing with a silent cry. Arthur gets him to release his other knee and straddles his chest, painting his neck and chin with his come.

Five minutes later, Merlin finds himself clean and wrapped up in Arthur’s blankets. Arthur’s plastered along his back, legs aligned with his, and his breath ruffles the hair at Merlin’s nape. Arthur must’ve taken care of him, cleaned him up and taken him to bed whilst he was too out of it. The act of kindness makes Merlin’s heartbeat stutter.

“Arthur?” Merlin whispers.

Arthur responds with a soft kiss to his neck.

“Did you do all this with me so that I’d —” Don’t say it. Don’t say it, Merlin. You don’t want to know the answer, because you know it’s going to fucking crush you, and you don’t want to be crushed, do you? You don’t want him to own you like this, even though he already owns every square inch of you. You don’t want him to fuck you and leave you — again.

“So that?” Arthur repeats, low, tense. Merlin wishes he had the nerve to turn around, face him, know the truth from his eyes.

“So that I’d have… incentive not to listen to your dad?”

There’s a long moment of silence.

And then Arthur laughs. “You got me.”

Merlin gasps, the air in his lungs fulminating. He wants to see Arthur’s eyes. He doesn’t turn, coward that he is.

“Hope it works, hm? Hope your Stockholm Syndrome gets you to do it.” A pause. “Go to sleep, Wyllt,” Arthur says, suddenly sounding tired.

“In your bed?” Merlin asks, trembling, cursing himself.

“Don’t you remember making all those whorish noises whilst I ate you out? If you leave _now_ , you’ll be found out by the other lads on the floor, and Matron will definitely kill me. You, too, but I matter more. So yeah, in my bed, but I’ll let you sleep on the floor if you really want to.”

But Arthur drapes his arm across Merlin’s chest, tight and loose, and buries his face in Merlin’s shoulder.

Inevitably, Merlin drifts off. It feels too much like the bully who hates him just gave him an out. The thought aches dully, pumping dead magma through his veins. This was not supposed to be his last time with Arthur.

(There was never supposed to be _any_ time with Arthur.)

* * *

 

He’s back in Will’s bed by the time Will wakes up the next morning, but he’s sure that Will knows he wasn’t there all night. Will purses his lips and says nothing, but Merlin suspects he’s going to have to come clean soon.

Headmaster Pendragon does indeed summon _Merlin Wyllt, Year 11_ , during the day.

Merlin can’t bear to look at the headmaster the entire time that he glares coldly and threatens Merlin off his son with smooth, fancy words he hasn’t a hope of rejecting; but he forces himself to meet those cruel eyes, and despite himself, despite his pathetic broken heart thundering in his chest, despite the plea he listened to last night, promises to stop bothering Arthur Pendragon, vows to stop trying to get his attention.


	7. she knows what i think about (and what i think about)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i don't even have an excuse for how late this update was. i would love to know what you thought.
> 
> i'll finish the story no matter what, i promise. (will delete this note upon posting the next chapter)

_six_

 

Uther Pendragon is everywhere. People’ve been talking — he’s never laid a foot in the halls of his school so often before. He will pass Merlin frequently, but he will not look at the boy himself. He is too good for penurious prodigy Merlin Wyllt. Merlin doesn’t know what the fuck his problem is. (Merlin knows his fucking problem, and hates him for it.)

He isn’t allowed to regret making his promise. He made the logical choice, the rational choice, the choice he would’ve told himself to make if he’d been in his senses. He can’t regret it. He won’t let himself.

Arthur must have been informed by his father, assuredly, that the homosexual boy two forms younger (lower) will no further be a hindrance to his future, since he doesn’t seek Merlin out when he’s alone any longer. Merlin won’t admit to himself that he lingers in all their usual haunts, hoping for a sudden tight hold on his wrist, a hug cloaked in a slow grind of hips. He hangs his head and imagines a spiteful voice whispering filthy things into his ear. Arthur’s breath would be hot, humid, welcome in the chill of early winter, and the kiss he’d brand into the skin beneath Merlin’s earlobe would be moist. He’d probably clutch Merlin like a little girl would her doll; possessive, selfish.

He won’t anymore, because Merlin behaved rationally for once in this entire farce; and Arthur may be a bully, a tyrant, a complete arsehole, but he won’t force Merlin. That, of all limits, is where his honour rears its head.

Honourable man, Arthur Pendragon. Won’t replace the love bites on Merlin’s neck and shoulders anymore. Merlin observed with dread as the marks yellowed and faded over a number of days. He’s never wanted to be less unmarred in his life; now there’s no outward proof that Arthur ever claimed him, ever had him.

Look at the idiot Merlin. So in love. So torn between his heart and his brain that he’s just standing there, paralysed, wishing he could wither into ashes from all the inexorable love that’s slowly consuming him from the inside out.

Idiot.

* * *

 

Studying takes up a lot of his time now. (It always did, but Merlin has never been so one-track before, intent on coming first in his class in a clean sweep and making sure his scholarship sponsors find nothing to complain about, nothing that they could use to deny the next scholarship applicant admission.)

Lancelot helps him, still — even though his loyalty should be to Arthur, he politely invites Merlin up to his room after school every day, spends two hours going over likely questions, previous papers, practice papers, papers, more papers, until Merlin’s vision goes blurry and one of them yawns wide enough that they can’t hide it from the other. Merlin tries very hard and fails each day not to think about the boy in the room just opposite.

He wonders what price Lancelot will exact from him for this (or if he’s just a charity case).

“Nothing,” Lancelot says, shock evident in every facet of his reaction. “My God, Merlin, no, I’d never even dream of — I know you’re a scholarship student.”

Merlin’s face burns at that. He should have had the privilege of being proud of it. Of being brilliant enough that the school as good as pays him to be here and raise its academic standard. Instead, rich kids who don’t know what it’s like to have to wear the same set of uniform clothes three years in a row get to push him down because of it.

“I’m sorry,” Lancelot ventures after Merlin just nods and stays quiet. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Yeah, I s’pose you didn’t.”

“No, Merlin, I mean it. You’ll probably hate me for this, but I really _am_ doing this out of the goodness of my heart or whatever” — Merlin can’t help snorting at the wonky, awkward, entreating grin on Lancelot’s face — “and let’s face it, another massive benefit is that I get to watch Arthur struggling not to sock me every time I mention tutoring you around him.”

Merlin’s exhale sticks in his throat, and his smile starts slipping. Hope pierces his stomach. It’s such a bad idea to ask, but — “What d’you mean?”

“He’s so jealous he can barely stay still around me,” says Lancelot, like it’s obvious, like it should be obvious. “You dropped him, didn’t you?”

“We were never —”

“Well, as good as. And he thinks you’re now having it off with me.”

“Did you,” Merlin begins, heart pounding so loud he can’t hear himself, “did you tell him we’re not?”

“I did, but of course he doesn’t believe it.”

Merlin blinks. This seems unreal. There’s no way it happened. Lancelot must be spinning stories. This is not the Arthur Merlin knows. He wouldn’t think this of one of his knights for even a minute.

Lancelot averts his eyes from Merlin. Then he meets his gaze again.

“I… Look. I know it seems like I hate him, Merlin, but I don’t. He’s my best friend. He’s usually far better than this — he’s noble to a fault, but when it comes to you, he just… loses it. Does anything he can to get and keep your attention.”

“It doesn’t make what he’s been doing all these years to me okay,” says Merlin, desperate for… Lancelot’s approval? Vindication? Validation? “I barely have any friends, most teachers look down on me, and that’s because of him, because no one wants to like someone that Arthur Pendragon hates.”

“He doesn’t hate you,” Lancelot replies, gentle, and that’s _really_ not an answer at all. Merlin only notices he stood up when Lance looks taken aback. He’s breathing hard like he ran a marathon, staring down at the other boy, who continues to speak. “He is utterly hideous towards you, Merlin, but it really isn’t because he hates you.”

“Don’t you dare defend him —” and where is _this_ anger coming from, hypocrite Merlin Wyllt? “Don’t you dare try and defend him to me!”

“I’m not,” Lancelot says, still gentle, like Merlin is a terrified wild beast, backed into a corner, in need of calming. “I’m not saying you should forgive him, I’m not saying he deserves it, I’m certainly not saying you should get back together with him —”

“But we were never together!” Merlin yells, and a distant part of him that withdrew into his head at the start of this turn in the conversation wonders if Lancelot will ever want to see Merlin again after this. His tutelage is invaluable, after all. Merlin wonders if Arthur can hear this in his room, if the shouting will let him see the beautiful blue of Arthur’s eyes once more. “He isn’t even bi! He’s just — he’s a monster, Lancelot, and he never loved me or fancied me and he only knows who I am because of Morris that day. I wish I’d never done it. Does that make me a bad person, Lancelot du Lac? I wish I’d never helped Morris. D’you know Headmaster threatened to have my scholarship rescinded if I even breathe the air around his son? Did you know that he blames _me_ ’cause Arthur’s not living as his slave?”

The silence that follows is shockingly loud. Merlin half-expects Arthur himself and the rest of his knights to slam the door open and beat him up for saying such beastly things. Lancelot won’t look at him. _Look at me_ , Merlin wants to yell.

“It’s… I’m sorry,” Lancelot says, voice diminished.

The fury bleeds out of Merlin to be replaced by fear. “Are you going to stop tutoring me now?”

“I might not have been born into nobility, but I’d like to think I have _some_ honour,” Lancelot says. The twisted smile makes a reappearance, but there is so much guilt in it that Merlin looks away.

They mutually, silently deem it best not to pursue this line of conversation, and somehow return to the subject they’d been going over. Merlin blinks once, hard. He doesn’t remember a single second of the day’s revision. He sits very still through the rest of the session, and afterwards, Lancelot says goodbye, showing him out as if the door isn’t right in front of them. Merlin stumbles three steps forward, half a step to the right, to Arthur’s door. He doesn’t care if Lancelot sees.

Merlin has never been drunk — Will tried to get him pissed a couple weeks ago, birthday boy buying his mate all the drinks instead of the other way round, but Merlin hadn’t had anything that night. Just water and non-alcoholic cocktails. The bartender had given him sidelong glances the entire time, as if to ask _why are you even here_ , whilst Will had got progressively drunker and danced with women who’d seen right through him and humoured him anyway. Finally, somehow, Merlin had dragged him back to his room, miraculously evading the notice of the matron, and collapsed with him into his bed. Will had mumbled something about how it’d been so much _fun_ , even though Merlin had been stubborn about sticking to the rules as much as possible.

But, standing in front of Arthur’s door, the polished wood more familiar to him now than his own bedroom’s panelling, he wonders if this is what Will must have felt like, legless off all that beer. The mind-numbing, swaying, suffocating helplessness, the precariousness of having something you need to say and needing to say it, damn the consequences; the thought that it’d all turn out okay in the morning, so why bother with restraint now?

He knocks. One, two, three sharp raps, and then he waits for Arthur to wrench open the door, having listened to him shout, to drag him in and smother him with kisses — will he be relieved? Will he be, God forbid, hurt? Will he hold Merlin to him tightly, nip at his ear, kiss him slow and deep, like the embrace is foreplay, like it’s what he wants to do with his cock?

It takes five minutes for Merlin to realise that _612 Pendragon_ isn’t opening.

He knocks again.

And again.

Someone sticks their head out from the room adjacent — _614 Greene_ — Gwaine.

“What ho, Merlin Wyllt,” he says, and he’s got a pitying smile aimed at Merlin. “King’s probably having an afternoon kip. Drop by some other time, okay?”

Merlin flushes, nods, and flees. Gwaine must have heard him knock every other time, too. He must know what he and Arthur used to get up to. He must have had to put up with the noises. Merlin’s so stupid. Lovesick, in love with his bully, loud and shameless in his bed, as if the world ceased to be the minute Arthur climbed atop him. He wouldn’t have stood a second for this sort of behaviour if he’d been on the outside looking at someone so fucked up. Oh, God. He’s _addicted_.

He’s addicted, and his cocaine doesn’t hate him anymore, his cocaine just doesn’t _care_ ; screw whatever Lancelot said. Why’s it so hard for Merlin to understand this? Even if he’d come close to giving a fuck, Merlin’s promise, made under duress to his father, it’s surely driven him off, turned him back into the boy who — who used to deride him at every turn, who sent Merlin home with torn notebooks and aching limbs and an execrable broken heart to conceal from his mother. Maybe it’d been all about sex. Easy orgasms. Arthur had as good as admitted to it, hadn’t he?

In the bus home, he gives up his seat to — he doesn’t remember, he’d just wanted to stand and try and balance himself against the lurch and _not think_. He gives up his seat tosomeone who probably needed it more. He gives up his seat. He gives up.

* * *

 

“We need to talk,” says William, the next week, on a day Merlin would have normally set aside for trysts with Arthur.

(It’s… delightful in a sense, that to be with him, Arthur, too, would’ve had to steal away from his mates. That he’d wanted to, some part of him, even if it’d been to cement Merlin’s devotion to him or something. It’s ridiculous, even, because Merlin’s lips were always so red after, swollen on occasion, his hair always so messy from Arthur’s hands fucking it up. He’d been so obvious about it sometimes. And yet no one ever asked him if he’d been snogged to within an inch of his life, if he’d been stuffed with three of Arthur’s fingers just fifteen minutes ago, if he’d come so hard in Arthur’s room, in Arthur’s bed, that he’d blacked out.)

Busy poring over his textbook, Merlin steals a glance at Will and shrugs. It’s a free period. Final exams are half a year away and they haven’t even learnt some of the stuff that’ll be on the GCSEs yet, but Merlin catches himself panicking every second that he’s not solving papers or writing essays or distracting himself (failing to distract himself) from thoughts of Arthur’s smile, so rarely for him; from the memories of Arthur’s firm hands, hot mouth, sure tongue on his body.

“Merlin.”

“William.”

“Please talk to me.”

That gives Merlin pause.

“Something’s very wrong,” Will says to him, slowly and carefully. As if he’s afraid Merlin will shut him out. Is that what he’s been doing in his one-track focus on Arthur? “Will you tell me what it is?”

“You won’t like it.”

“Try me.”

Merlin casts about to see if anyone’s eavesdropping. Daegal, on his other side, is immersed in a novel, painfully earnest about it. A few other classmates who bought into the Head Boy’s hatred of Merlin have rearranged their desks so that they’re chattering at each other in a circle. Drea and Gwen, Year 11 prefects, are lounging at the back, uncaring if the class devolves into ruckus during the free period. Freya’s hidden behind more of Merlin’s classmates. No one’s in any position to overhear, what with all the noise a classroom left to itself generates, but Merlin leans in towards Will anyway. Months and months of keeping this hidden on pain of death, and now it feels only too easy to spill.

“I’ve been shagging Pendragon.”

Will — _shouts yells scowls_ — seems unsurprised. “Yeah. I saw you two getting off outside my room the night we went into town. He had his hand down your pants.”

Merlin takes a second to absorb this. His cheeks blush hot with blood. He’d taken it as read that even if he and Arthur were to get caught, Will’d be too sloshed to remember the next morning. His calm acceptance, his utter lack of shock ignites Merlin’s embarrassment into fury. He knows it’s not Will he’s really angry at, but torrents take the path of least resistance.

“Then why the hell did you ask?”

“Because you didn’t tell me,” Will has the temerity to say.

“ _Now_ you decide to be a considerate friend,” Merlin hisses, and whips his textbook open again. The words crawl all over the page, make swirly spirals and jumble up, divide into halves, blur into each other. His vision dims. “When you’re the reason I’m up to my ears in this shit.” He can’t bring himself to look at the astonishment that must certainly now splashed across Will’s face, that must be stiffening his body.

“You’re how he found out I fancy him,” he continues. “He heard you talking about how much I’m in _love_ with him, and then he started to hurt me a new way.”

“Wait, what? Merlin — no, wait, Merlin,” Will starts, as if Merlin is now going to storm off after this revelation, but Merlin sits very still and focuses on the diagram on the top right corner of the right page of his book. No fucking clue what it’s about. “Merlin, is he making you? Is he ra—”

“He isn’t,” says Merlin firmly.

Will sounds a bit sick. “Are you sure, mate?”

“If it wasn’t obvious to you from the night you saw us: I _wanted_ him to do everything that we did.”

“Okay,” Will offers, apparently at a loss for words. “Okay.”

Merlin shakes his head. He doesn’t even get to see Arthur anymore. It’s as if Arthur makes himself invisible whenever Merlin gets closer than twenty metres to him. He precludes every chance Merlin might have to spot him; except the morning of the day before yesterday, when he had inadvertently been late. Hunith’s alarm hadn’t gone off, so Merlin hadn’t heard it go off. Merlin had had to take the bus after his usual one, half an hour later, and when he’d run past the gates, Arthur (and Mithian) had been waiting. Mithian took down his name, made him sign the tardy list — and Arthur had just stared into the middle distance every time Merlin glanced at him, with his back ramrod straight, as if he was about to go to war. When Merlin rushed on, seemingly out of earshot but not quite, Arthur said to Mithian, “Didn’t say one _mean_  word to the toerag. Happy now?”, and it’d be laughable if it hadn’t broken Merlin’s heart anew.

“I’m so sorry,” Will says.

“Changes nothing. Don’t apologise a second time, or I might actually risk my scholarship” — _again_ , how hysterical — “and sock you one.”

“But he’s using your feelings for him to get off.”

“Not anymore, ’s why Headmaster called me in that day.” And now he dreams and dreams of scenarios in which he spits in Uther’s face, he and Arthur profess undying love for each other, and have — chance would be a fine thing! — tons of romantic sex and a Disney fairytale ending. How farcical. 

Merlin folds his arms on the desktop and rests his forehead on them, closing his burning dry eyes. He was supposed to feel better by now. He was supposed to feel lighter, like his chest could fully expand, like he could take a deep breath for the first time in ages, having divulged this awful part of his life to someone else.

“Is that something you’re happy about?”

“How the hell can I be,” Merlin snaps, honest with himself for once. Oh, here’s William Chauncey, trying his very best to be a therapist, expressing himself so laboriously. Merlin should appreciate this. Will’s his best friend, after all. The very best, since childhood, who stays over with Merlin and his mum every weekend, who’s the Ron to his Harry, the steadfast soldier to his lonely neurotic — fuck. Will’s just being a friend to him.

“Sorry,” Merlin says, shame colouring the word, obliterating the pointless anger. “You don’t deserve this, mate.”

“Yeah, well.”

All forgiven, Will reaches out and tugs Merlin into a headlock across both their desks. Merlin nearly tips over in his chair, yells, and fights free, but they both know that it’s just for show.

Freya calls out something insulting from somewhere in the back of the classroom, Daegal on Merlin’s other side snorts, and even perfect Prefect Gwen gets in on the mock-Merlin action. Merlin laughs and it’s an odd sound, but Will looks so profoundly relieved that his eyes fill up and he has to hook Will into a second headlock to get rid of the emotion. There’s chaos and laughter, and for a moment, a single shining moment that Merlin will often think back to, Arthur Pendragon no longer exists for Merlin Wyllt.

**Author's Note:**

> Your thoughts would be highly, highly appreciated <3


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